A proposal for radical publication reform in linguistics: Language Science Press, and the next steps | Diversity Linguistics Comment

"Book publication in linguistics (and other fields of scholarship) has become so absurd that I’ve started saying that it’s the biggest problem of contemporary linguistics: Books of major publishers cost about €0.20-0.40 per page, and articles are even worse. This is something that perhaps I notice more than other linguists in the richer countries, because as a typologist I need access to works on many different languages. The commercial publishers would argue that this is unavoidable, but filesharing has become so easy that I expect fewer and fewer scholars to be willing to accept this argumentation in the future. What is it that the commercial publishers add to the value of our manuscripts? They used to print and distribute books, but we don’t really need this anymore (due to technological changes, print-on-demand services are more efficient than large printruns anyway). They used to advertise books and organize the sale of books, but from the authors’ perspective, it would be much better if our books were freely available. This is the big difference between science and music or film: No scientist has ever made a living off the sales of their books and articles. These days, the best advertisements are social media like Facebook and Twitter, and we don’t need publishers for this. Publishers normally expect that the manuscript of your book is not freely downloadable from your website, so by 'publishing' a book, you actually make it less public. While not published yet, it’s freely available on your website to anyone in the world, and after publication, it exists as a paper copy in a few dozen libraries in the rich countries – this is what I call absurd. So why do people still publish books with the traditional commercial publishers, instead of just putting their works on their website, or making them available via sites like ResearchGate or Academia.edu? The reason is not that this would benefit the readers – the reason is that it benefits the authors. What authors primarily get from the publishers is prestige, and this is the most urgent thing they need. Prestige is what builds careers, and without careers there’s no academic linguistics. Everything else comes after that. This is why people publish grammars of small languages at prices that are totally unaffordable to the speakers, and unaffordable also to many linguists who would like to read them. The authors don’t feel good about it (I certainly felt awful when my grammar of Lezgian was published, which costs EUR 229.00), but they often accept it as a necessary evil. However, the prestige of publishers is not something that the publishers themselves created on their own. Publishers’ imprints are prestigious because prestigious scholars have published with them. For example, Mouton (which later became De Gruyter Mouton) got a big boost from publishing Noam Chomsky’s Syntactic structures in 1957. So prestige is something that ultimately derives from prestigious scholars. If enough established scholars get together, they can create an imprint that is prestigious, out of nothing. This has often worked with journals, and it also works with book imprints. This is the idea of Language Science Press, a new book imprint associated with the Freie Universität Berlin, run by Stefan Müller together with me. We approached many colleagues and asked them if they favour the idea of free (open-access) electronic book publication in general terms, and after an overwhelmingly positive response, we decided to go ahead and start a new scholar-owned linguistics publisher. In the meantime, the DFG has awarded us over €500.000 to pursue this idea, so we can expand our activities ..."